![]() ![]() This and that other by-product of COVID-19, the chip shortage, meant that over the past year we’ve been treated to several event badges that should have appeared in 2020 or 2021, but didn’t due to those cancelled events. Two-day tickets are $125 for adults, $50 for students and free for those younger than 17.One effect of the global pandemic was that there were relatively few events in our sphere for a couple of years. He will speak about the current state of the cybersecurity industry and its impact on the world. Kennedy is co-author of “Metasploit: The Penetration Tester’s Guide.” He is also the creator of the Social-Engineer Toolkit and co-founder of the Derb圜on cybersecurity conference in Kentucky. “We want to make this a community event, where we stick a flag in the ground and say, ‘Albany has a very good budding cybersecurity community,’” he said.ĭave Kennedy, the founder and principal security consultant of TrustedSec, will be ANYCon’s keynote speaker. He hopes to use ANYCon to further develop that talent. “We do have some really good pipelines of talent that are emerging, between all the colleges in the area,” Wrightson said. What colleges are good at is preparing people to move into the field, he added, by grounding them in network engineering, programming and network administration - the fundamental infrastructure that black hats corrupt and white hats protect. It’s impossible to print an up-to-date textbook about the subject, and colleges don’t turn out graduates ready to immediately combat black-hat hackers through offensive security measures, he said. This is the challenge of cybersecurity: As black hats follow the path of least resistance, white hats block them, and if they are successful, something else becomes the path of least resistance.Įffective cybersecurity and white hat hacking contain a large education component, Wrightson said: professionals have to constantly update their knowledge base. “Criminals could do that today it’s just a question of whether it’s worth their effort.” “This is literally the easiest, most brute-force way to frighten anyone,” he said. New types of ransomware will be deployed, Wrightson predicted, that will do things like leaving data accessible but completely scrambled - patient names and treatment details switched in medical records, or numbers moved on financial data before it is released to regulators and stockholders. Ransomware like the worldwide WannaCry hack last month is one of the major cybersecurity threats today, he said, but the current model - where data on an infected computer is locked or encrypted so users can’t get at it unless they pay the hacker a ransom - is just “the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “Hackers are like water they’re going to follow the path of least resistance.” “The methods that we use basically work everywhere,” Wrightson said. His company works for firms and agencies of all sizes, and while the tactics and details of what Leet does for each client vary, the results don’t. “Even some of the things that are cutting-edge, they’ll be obsolete three months from now,” he explained. Government agencies and private entities keep tabs on black hat hackers and their activities, but they are a moving target - hacking tools and techniques change weekly or even daily, Wrightson said. “I think our government is getting very good at responding to threats that operate in America, but that’s one of the challenges,” he said. Also, many are operating in countries that don’t do anything to stop them. They can be hard to combat because seeking or possessing the knowledge isn’t illegal - misusing it is. They spread knowledge through chat rooms, message boards, the “dark web” and sometimes even face-to-face meetings, Wrightson said. With that sea change has come an entire category of criminals looking for illicit gain from all those computers. ![]() And it’s invaded people’s personal lives.” “You can’t not be connected to the Internet now. “Everyone has had technology thrown into their business,” he said. “We get hired to identify those weaknesses before hackers do.”Ĭybersecurity is a rapidly growing field, he said, with essentially zero percent unemployment and room for perhaps a million new practitioners. If someone comes to Leet with a computer infection or security breach, Leet refers them to a company that specializes in damage control. ![]()
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